Parlour Games for Christmas by Judith Allnatt

Like many people in these difficult times, I've turned to light reading as a bit of escapism and my most recent choice  has been to reread The Diary of  a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith, published in 1892.  The 'nobody' in question is Mr Charlie Pooter, Edwardian bank clerk: a comic creation who tells  terrible jokes yet takes himself rather too seriously.  He dutifully records his household woes, for instance his threat  to walk out if the same blancmange is served up again after seeing it 'for every meal since Wednesday'. He and his wife Carrie are often visited by two friends: Cummings and Gowing (of course he makes a joke about that). Their entertainments include cards, singing, and impressions but also parlour games such as Cutlets.

Cutlets involves one person sitting down, and everyone else being asked in turn to sit on the lap of the person before them until they are arranged one on top of another in a pile, provoking general hilarity. Then, they are asked 'Are you a believer in the great Mogul?' to which they have to answer all together 'Yes, oh yes!' when unexpectedly,  the person on the bottom gets up, resulting in a toppling of the pile.  The game was clearly perceived as a little risqué, as Grossmith presents the husbands as insisting that the wives sit on their spouses' laps and not anyone else's! 

This made me think about how grownup  'play' often involves  a challenge to the propriety of the day: the rules of the game  temporarily replacing the normal rules of staid adult mores to allow behaviour that, in the parlance of the day, is a little 'naughty' or 'daring’.

Readers may remember playing Blind Man's Buff  as a child at parties. My memory of the game includes being spun around until you were dizzy when being the 'blind man' and the aim of the game being to catch one of the kids who were calling out and poking you, so that they would have to take over the role and you could escape. However, for centuries the game has clearly been played not only by children but by adults. Tennyson mentions playing it in 1855 and the painting below, by Pietro Longhi  shows it being played in an eighteenth century scene. The original version of the game had a further element that our childish version lacked, which is that the blind man  has to identify, by touch, the person they have captured, before they are allowed to swap roles. Like Cutlets, Blind Man's Buff involves physical contact normally outside the realm of polite behaviour, providing both humour and flirtatious opportunity.

Reverand Crawley's Circle demands that all the players hold hands, but not with the people immediately next to them. The resulting knot then has to be untangled by twisting, turning and stepping through gaps, without letting go, resulting in contortions much like the modern game of Twister. The identity of Reverand Crawley has long ago been lost. Was he even a real person? Or was the name chosen to give a spurious permission from religious authority to get 'up close and personal’?

Sardines is another game that involves close physical contact. The game is a back-to-front version of Hide-and -Seek. Only one player hides, then as each seeker finds them they have to join them in their hiding place so that it becomes progressively more 'cozy' or 'cramped', depending on one's attitude to the person  in close quarters next to you. 

Some games, rather than making mischief with polite gender norms, allow a playful expression of aggression. Where are you Moriarty? is a game that presumably makes reference to the longstanding enmity between Holmes and the criminal mastermind. It requires two players, both blindfolded, and each holding a rolled up newspaper, to lie on the floor head to head, with a gap of around a metre between them. One asks the question and when the other answers 'Here!' the first attempts to hit them with the newspaper whilst they roll about trying to avoid getting bashed.

More modern games sometimes have elements of older ones. Killer is a game played at Christmas in our household because it works for almost all age groups, including the elderly, who might prefer to sit. It starts with everyone receiving a piece of paper, only one of which has the word 'Killer' written upon it. The players then sit in a circle while the killer seeks to catch a person's eye and 'kill' them by winking. The victims have to count to twenty before they expire, to give the killer the chance to perform a further massacre before anyone can accuse them. The winner is the person who manages to level a correct  accusation before being winked to death and a wrong accusation results in exclusion from the game. The Victorian game If you Love me Dearest, Smile worked on a similar principle but was far more innocent. It required  a nominated person to smile at the other players to get them to smile in turn, the winner being the last one to hold out against smiling - a gift to a young lady  looking for an excuse  to catch the eye of a particular gentleman . . .

Parlour games may seem rather tame to us today when we're used to more sophisticated entertainment. However, over a Christmas that, at the time of writing, may well be constrained by Covid regulations, they have something to recommend them as a way to entertain the members of a single household, who may have a wide spread of ages. What they all have in common is that they tend to end in one thing - laughter - and we could all do with some of that.

Chat with me about this post @JudithAllnatt or read more about my writing and more blogposts here

From Sinister to Sweet: The Strange Tale of the Nutcracker by Catherine Hokin

A deeply creepy inventor ‘uncle’, a seven-headed mouse, a little girl who tears her arm open on broken glass and a curse which traps first a queen and then a boy inside the misshapen body of a giant nutcracker: what better story to entertain your little ones with this Christmas? 

For the next few weeks theatre foyers will mill with children stickily clutching wands and toy soldiers and waiting to be inducted into the wonderful Christmas world of The Nutcracker, a ballet with far darker origins than their sugar plum fairy and sweetie-filled heads can possibly imagine.

The Nutcracker was first performed on the 18th December 1892 at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, set to music by Tchaikovsky. The book on which this ballet was based - Histoire d’une Casse-Noisette by Alexandre Dumas - was not, however, the original story. That first appeared in 1816, in ETA Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. 

Hoffmann wrote a number of spooky stories that were set to music during the 19th century. One of these, The Sandman which is about about evil inventors who create a robotic girl, appears in the Offenbach opera, The Tales of Hoffmann and likely inspired the ballet Coppelia, in which a young man who falls in love with a life-size dancing doll. The original Hoffmann story, as outlined above, is a complex thing which blurs fantasy and reality. The rodents are cursed, the parents are oppressive and cruel and the little girl at the centre of the story runs away to her nightmare/dream world and does not return.

The Dumas version, which continues to form the basis of the ballet, simplified the plot and made the story rather more gentle. In this version, Clara rejects the fantasy world and wakes up happy and smiling under the Christmas tree, a Hollywood-style ending which was largely the reason for the ballet’s future success. And its success was very much in the future. In 1892, the unimpressed Russian critics called the choreography confusing, the libretto lopsided and the whole experience (according to the St Petersburg Gazette) “the most tedious thing I have ever seen.” After the first Russian Revolution in 1905, the ballet was dropped from the repertoire and, in a twist Hoffmann (and his fan Edgar Allen Poe) may have appreciated, its principal male lead, Sergei Legat, slit his throat.

Many of the Mariinsky dancers scattered across Europe in the early twentieth century and the ballet re-appeared, first in Budapest in 1927 and then in London in 1934. 

It took an American showman, however, to bring The Nutcracker fully back into the light. In 1940, Walt Disney used the entire Tchaikovsky score in Fantasia, bringing the music to a huge new audience. On Christmas Eve 1944 the San Francisco Ballet performed the first complete version of the ballet and in 1954 George Balanchine’s New York production turned the ballet into the classic Land of Snow and Kingdom of Sweets version we recognise today. Where America went, the rest of the world followed: more companies have performed The Nutcracker than any other ballet. In 2015 the Royal Ballet December production was beamed live to 2000 cinemas and, according to Daniel J Wakin of the New York Times, its holiday run “is generally the foundation of an American dance company”.

Why has The Nutcracker become so popular that even non-ballet fans, who would run a mile at a suggestion of an evening with Les Sylphides, are happy to be dragged along? 

Perhaps because it truly is family-friendly: it has parts for over 35 children; a pattern of short, highly-charged dances and watered-down cute mice and dancing toys. Perhaps because, in the words of Isabel McMeekan, founder of Everyday Ballet and a former dancer, it is“the eternal fantasy of Christmas come to life on stage…the girl, the guy, the dream, the magic tree that grows to 7 feet, the glittery snowflakes.” Or perhaps because it has proved so adaptable. As well as traditional outings, there have been hip-hop, LGBT and Jewish versions and, my own personal favourite, Matthew Bourne’s Dickensian orphanage with its pyjama-clad cupids and cast of very wicked sweets (check out the exceedingly sticky Knickerbocker Glory). 

And in that, I think, lies the ballet’s endurance – to paraphrase one supermarket’s ad: however you do Christmas, there’s a Nutcracker for you.

Gibbering light - Michelle Lovric

Christmas in Venice is a season of low winter light gibbering on the stones under the bridges. The Venetians call this phenomenon ‘gibigiana’. The Italian word for it seems to be ‘sbarlusso’.

The winter sun brings out the basking cats, particularly the three magnificent Maine Coons at the Calle dei Muti. I think this one below is called ‘Rudolf’. In a scene that was sadly edited out of my forthcoming children’s book, these cats had a starring role. They even danced the hornpipe. Oh well.

Everyone who is anyone in Venice gets their Christmas tree at this little outpost at San Felice.

 

I don’t know why this seems to be the only place. It has been for all decades I’ve been here. I imagine the journeys of these trees … perhaps from Slovenia via Trieste to this city. I imagine them disappearing into the homes of the disappearing Venetians. The 'Venetian counter' in Campo San Bartolomeo was down to around 53,000 last time I checked.

 

Where there are Christmas trees, there are decorations. This shop in San Pantalon always has the best ones in Venice. One year, I am going to crack and buy these dinosaurs. I really am.

 

But I won’t be dipping into this basket of Moors.

I have written elsewhere of the patere, discs of stone sliced from columns and decorated with cautionary scenes, usually of beast eating one another. I always look out for previously unseen patere in Venice and this is a new one for me: two lobsters grappling.

It’s at the Ponte delle Guglie. Lobster is on the menu at all the most expensive restaurants on New Year’s Eve in Venice. So it seems appropriate to the season.

On a killing note, Christmas is the time when Venetian ladies of a certain age get out their minks. Fur brings out the brilliant orange lipstick and the glittering earrings. The earrings bring out the diamond rings and the designer sunglasses. There’s no word in Italian for ‘privacy’ but I decided not to shame any of the minky ladies with a photograph. I can only hope that many of these elegant she-bears shuffling around Venice are wearing their grandmothers’ coats. Venetian senators surely handed down their robes lined with squirrel fur. How many squirrels must have been culled to supply the Maggior Consiglio of around 2000 patricians in the long life of the Venetian Republic?

On the vaporetto the other night, I saw a Venetian lady of fashion wearing the skins of at least three different animals. However, on a designer lead she dragged a little dog with a lustrous pelt of his own. Was it just me, or did that dog have a worried expression every time he looked up at his mistress? And, I wondered, how could she herself not see the irony of prizing her pet’s fur as the living upholstery of her love-object while taking it for granted that the beasts of the forest and jungle must be slaughtered to keep her looking expensive?
Venice, fortunately, doesn’t do garish Christmas lights or ruin the Grand Canal with Disneyfied illuminations. Around San Marco and Rialto, there are usually beautiful cascades of pinpoint white lights. This lovely picture was taken by Janny Williams under the arches that formerly enclosed Venice's jewellers at Rialto.

 

I was hoping to find some kind of lurid lit Veneziana to join my Venetian Christmas grotto in London, but I failed. The town hall's tall columns are garlanded. There are little cribs everywhere. This one below is at the gondola stazione at Santa Sofia, which porters people from Cannaregio over to the Rialto Market and back.

 

There’s a hotel near Ca’ d’Oro with a vast nativity scene all lit up in its garden.

 

But on closer look, something is missing in the manger department.

 

 

A friend explained that the Christ child is not added until Christmas morning, Of course.

And when I went back to check after Christmas … there He was.

In the bigger squares, there are also lovely stalls selling every possible accoutrement for your home crib … this year there are steampunk accessories for the modern manger; masks, too. And of course there are cakes. At this time of year, panettone, pandoro and focaccia all become currency. People trundle around with trolleys full of exquisitely packaged confectionery.

At the Bifora in Santa Margherita, the decorations are simply beautiful, adding beauty to beauty. The Murano glass chandeliers bear extra glass balls of scarlet.

 

The roof is festoonery with greenery. And the company is absolutely splendid. (Photo by Ross Frassanito, with thanks, and not just for the photo …)

  

Finally, the best modern retail acknowledges Venetian history. This is the window display in a shop by the Ponte delle Tette, a place where state-sponsored courtesans would bare their breasts to encourage customers.

Merry Christmas to Venice past and present! (photo by Janny Williams, with thanks).

 Michelle Lovric's new website.

Mary and Jesus as refugees by Janie Hampton

'Rest on the Flight into Egypt' by Bonifazio de Pitati (1487– 1553) 

Once Christmas Day is over, we tend to forget about the small family in a stable in Bethlehem, and what they did next. I’ve been wondering about Mary, and how she coped as a new young mother, in a strange town, with no home or family. We only know what the gospels of Luke and Matthew chose to write about the birth and first weeks of Jesus' life. Matthew tells us that Mary was a virgin, but Joseph her ‘espoused’ learned that she was pregnant, and not by him. An angel told him not to worry, because ‘that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.’ So he agreed to marry her, and Jesus was born in Bethlehem. That’s all he has to say about the Nativity.

The Flight into Egypt by Battista Dossi and Dosso Dossi, c.1530, with two donkeys!

Luke gives much more detail. Joseph and Mary had to travel to Bethlehem for a Roman taxation census. While in Bethlehem, Mary ‘brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room in the inn.’ Shepherds and wise men came to worship him, and when Jesus was eight days old he was circumcised according to Jewish law. Meanwhile Mary stayed indoors for 40 days until ‘the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished.’ Then they went to Jerusalem on their way north, where they offered a sacrifice of two turtledoves. After that Jesus ‘grew and waxed strong in spirit’ back at home in Nazareth.
Both accounts were written over 60 years after the events, and by men, so there is no mention of the things women might be interested in. How long was the labour? Did it start while they were travelling the 80 miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem? The journey would have taken them at least four days on foot. As a carpenter, Joseph could well have owned a donkey for carrying his tools and timber. Christmas cards often depict Mary on a donkey out of sympathy for her predicament as a full-term primigravida, though she might have walked all the way.
As Joseph came originally from Bethlehem, he probably had relatives living there. Joseph’s mother, sister or an aunt may have accompanied Mary through her labour, cut the umbilical cord and disposed of the placenta. Jesus was then ‘laid in a manger’ - a net or wooden box containing hay for cattle – a prickly place for a baby! A manger (from the French word ‘to eat’) can be attached to a wall, a practical way of keeping a new-born baby safe from dogs and draughts while Mary was sleeping.
Bethlehem is at a high altitude and it could have been very cold, so Mary would have kept her new baby close to her body most of the time. We don’t know if they stayed in the stable for the 40 days Mary had to wait for her purification, a time of post-partum bleeding, or lochia. Hopefully, Joseph’s female relatives provided Mary with the necessary cloths which she then washed, and hung up to dry?
Matthew next tells of wise men from the East who visited the new baby, and warned his parents to return home by a different route, as King Herod wanted to kill the baby. Sometime after they returned to Nazareth, Joseph was warned in a dream to take the child to safety in Egypt. They left immediately by night, becoming refugees.
Matthew’s account does not say when they had to flee to Egypt, but King Herod had ordered all boys under two years old to be slaughtered – indicating Jesus must have been about 20 months.

As the many depictions have imagined the holy refugees,
Jesus was probably still being breastfed.

They probably took the Via Maris – a well-trodden trade route along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, that ran from Damascus to Memphis in Egypt. The journey from Nazareth to Abu Serghis, on the far side of the River Nile where tradition has it they settled, is about 500 miles. Google Map estimates this takes 150 hours to walk. So if the family kept up a pace of 8 hours a day, that would have taken them three weeks without breaks. Jesus would have been carried much of the way, breastfed every few hours; and Mary may well have had a menstrual period en route. Imagine her discomfort while walking or sitting on a donkey, with just cloth rags. There are many mediaeval and renaissance paintings of Mary breastfeeding Jesus. She is shown with a bounteous supply of milk and fullsome breasts, and Jesus is a well-fed chubby boy.

Giotto Bondone was one of many major artists who depicted the Flight from Egypt.

‘The Rest on the Flight into Egypt’ became a common depiction in the life of Christ after the 14th century. As interest in landscape painting increased, the subject became even more popular and the figures were often shown in European scenery.  The paintings are lovely but the conditions would have been much harsher in AD 2, with the risk of bandits as well as desert conditions of starvation, heat and cold. Until recently few historians have thought about how women dealt with menstruation in ordinary life, let alone as refugees, or women in the Bible. What was it really like? To recapture this experience, we can look at female refugees fleeing from war now. The testimony of the two women in this film, made in a refugee camp in Malawi two months ago, gives us an insight. Alphonsine and Pendeza are both Christians, but almost certainly unaware that their unintended journeys across Africa were similar to Mary’s 2000 years ago. I hope that they, like she was, are able to return to their homes one day soon.

'From Rags to Cups - Dzaleka Refugee Camp, Malawi. ' 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR9S3GU_6pM&feature=youtu.be 

Illustrated Bibles of my childhood, as depicted by Scott Orr circa 1930. 

All quotes are from the King James Bible, published in English in 1611.

www.janiehampton.co.uk

Homes and homelessness at Christmas by Fay Bound Alberti

This month my blog is a brief one. The reason is simple: I am moving house for the second time since August. I write surrounded by boxes that are yet to be unpacked and glasses without a home. But amidst the debris of the move, I am minded how lucky I am to have a home when so many do not.

We have become accustomed, of late, to think of the lonely at Christmas; those without family or friends, those who are widowed or suddenly alone after a period of togetherness. Media coverage tends to focus on elderly people at Christmas, quite justifiably conscious of the gap between the haves and the have-nots in terms of social connection and belonging during a season marked by togetherness.

The world's first Christmas card, produced in 1834

Of course, for many people, families bring sadness and discomfort and a gap between the real and the ideal. The Victorian invention of Christmas, with all its trimmings: turkeys and sprouts, long hours spent at leisure, Christmas cards and carols, is just that for many: an invention. I have written about this invention for the Wellcome Collection, which is devoting a series of articles to loneliness during the Christmas week.

There are many kinds of Christmases, many different versions of family. Yet for homeless people and refugees, Christmas brings a particular kind of loneliness. The history of loneliness has received very little attention, though we know it is both an urban, modern problem. Early modern politicians worried about 'masterless men' roaming the countryside, many of whom were soldiers, but homelessness grew exponentially as a result of urbanisation and industrialisation in the nineteenth century.

It is impossible as 2018 draws to a close, not to see the numbers of homeless people increasing.  Since the 1980s, homelessness has been a particularly growing problem in the UK (and the US), but never before has it been so visible on our streets. Tory austerity and benefit cuts have resulted in more people than ever before being homeless at Christmas, as well as all year round. This Christmas, more than 24,000 people will sleep rough in Britain over the festive period. It's a shocking statistic.

As the weather becomes colder and the spirit of Christmas falls upon us, why not spare a thought for those with no place to call home. Organisations that support the homeless at Christmas include Crisis, which not only provides a Christmas meal and companionship, but also crucial medical and physical care. The Salvation Army provides support for homeless families and individuals, while other charities support specific groups, like veterans.

Support for the homeless is needed all year round, not only at Christmas. Charities facing a glut of volunteer in the festive season find themselves chronically understaffed  the rest of the year.  Like loneliness, the emotional effects of homelessness are exacerbated by the symbolism of the season. Not everyone wants to be with other people at Christmas; not everyone celebrates Christmas. But everyone wants a place to feel safe, and somewhere to come home to.

Wishing all readers and fellow History Girls a safe and happy Christmas.

www.fayboundalberti.com

Cabinet of Curiosities by Charlotte Wightwick - Gingerbreadmen, women, angels and more...

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. Mine was spent, as appears to be traditional for me, either in a food-related stupor, or watching TV programmes about food (and often both). Now I have to admit to a certain amount of perplexity when watching some of these (seriously, how complicated can it be to roast a turkey?) but I did come across one real gem, and the inspiration for this month’s entry into the History Girls’ Cabinet of Curiosities. Naturally I can’t remember which programme it was on, so I can’t just point you in the direction of the telly and get back to lazing around – although that is probably no bad thing.

What caught my eye on TV was a demonstration of how gingerbread was made in the medieval and early modern period, and in particular showcased the variety of stunning moulds that were used to make it.

Gingerbread mould, C17th

Gingerbread mould, C17th

Not for our forebears a clumsy, vaguely humanoid shape with raisins for eyes and smarties for buttons: originally, gingerbread was beautiful, elaborate and, to top it all off, often gilded. Of course, as spices such as ginger were luxury items, gold just added to the bling effect…

It also seems to explain (although this is only my guess) why gingerbread is called bread, given that we think of as gingerbread is more of a cake or a biscuit: originally, recipes featured breadcrumbs rather than flour. Mixed with spices and wet ingredients, the mixture was then pressed into the elaborate moulds and left to dry next to the fire (not baked in an oven). Other recipes used almond paste to make white gingerbread.

More details (and recipes) can be found at http://www.theoldfoodie.com/2006/12/through-ages-with-gingerbread.html or http://www.historicfood.com/Gingerbread%20Recipe.html.

Alternatively you could of course just watch rolling Christmas food telly for hours on end to find the right TV programme. It would be a sacrifice to historical research worth making!

Gingerbread mould of an angel from Aachen. All images from Wikimedia Commons

Christmas: a Biography by Judith Flanders

Our December guest is Judith Flanders, interviewed here by Charlotte Wightwick.

Judith Flanders was born in London, England, in 1959. She moved to Montreal, Canada, when she was two, and spent her childhood there, apart from a year in Israel in 1972, where she signally failed to master Hebrew.

After university, Judith returned to London and began working as an editor for various publishing houses. After this 17-year misstep, she began to write and in 2001 her first book, A Circle of Sisters, the biography of four Victorian sisters, was published to great acclaim, and nominated for the Guardian First Book Award. In 2003, The Victorian House (2004 in the USA, as Inside the Victorian Home) received widespread praise, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards History Book of the Year. In 2006 Consuming Passions, was published. Her book, The Invention of Murder, was shortlisted for the 2011 CWA Non–Fiction Dagger.  The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London was published in 2012. And now, Christmas: a Biography has been published by Picador.

https://www.judithflanders.co.uk

Welcome, Judith, for agreeing to be our very seasonal guest

Charlotte Wightwick: The book is called Christmas: A Biography. Why 'Biography' rather than 'History’?

Judith Flanders: I wish I had a more profound answer for this, but mostly it was because I wanted to give the subject a bit of ‘life’, not just that it was either dead history, or living kitsch. Oh, that and my publisher liked it.

CW: Its a commonplace that 'the Victorians invented Christmas as we know it.' How far is this true?

JF: Not true at all. This was what I thought when I began. (Annoyingly, this was even what I had written previously.) But the really exciting part of historical research is that you get to change your mind, and within only weeks I realized that this was just wrong, wrong, wrong. One historian had famously written that between 1790 and 1832, the Times newspaper had barely mentioned Christmas most years, and many years had never mentioned it at all. He had done his work before newspaper digitisation, so I had a huge advantage. When I ran a digital search on those dates in the Times, I actually found more than 5,000 mentions…

Christmas has always been a holiday of consumption. For most of history from the earliest mentions, in the 4th century, it was about consuming food and (especially) drink. With the coming of mass production and industrialization, the types of consumption changed, from food and drink to presents (and more food and drink!), which makes us think of the 19th century as being the period when Christmas was ‘invented’, but that really couldn’t be further from the truth.

CW: What's your favourite fact or story about Christmas which you didn't previously know? What surprised you when researching the book?

JF: There were endless surprises, but my favourite fact was one that showed how little change there has been in some things. In 1805, on the Lewis and Clark expedition, a government-sponsored expedition to map out much of the west of America, Lieutenant Lewis recorded in his diary that Captain Clark had given him ‘Fleeshe Hoserey vest draws & Socks’, and another man had given him a ‘pr. Mockerson’. That is, he received fleece hosiery (long underwear), a vest, underpants and socks, as well as a pair of slippers. It was good to know that boring Christmas presents have a long history!

CW: As well as universal traditions, every family/ set of friends has its own particular festive quirks. What's your own favourite personal Christmas tradition?

JF: I have to admit to being a total Christmas fraud in real life, compared to on the page — I’m Jewish, and don’t celebrate Christmas. We had a tree a couple of times when I was a child, but it was never a big thing for my family. And today I do nothing at all: I find the run-up to Christmas so exhausting that I’m always happy just to lie on the sofa through the holidays, reading all the books I didn’t get around to all year.

CW: Santa: is he real? (Sorry, couldn't resist!)

JF: Oh dear. This is going to take a while, isn’t it? I’m sorry, Virginia, but I have to tell you that no, Santa Claus isn’t real. But the various ‘Santas’ that have been suggested include a ‘coster’ (a street-seller of fruit and vegetables) who breathes fire through the keyhole on bad boys and girls, and, my own favourite, a newspaper in 1815 which had a letter signed ‘Santa Claus, Queen and Empress of all handsome girls…Queen and Empress of the Court of Fashions’, followed by a letter of approval from this ‘good, delightful, charming’ woman’s husband, St Nicholas. So there you have it, Santa is really a woman.

(We are very grateful to Judith, Charlotte and the publishers at Picador for responding so swiftly to our request, after a glitch in the system nearly left us guestless in December!)